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He has learned the music but not the lingo. Keith Miller is perhaps the only opera singer who can talk about "running an aria" the way a fullback talks about running for daylight - as he used to do, before he called an audible on his football career.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Chicago doesn't send its opera on vacation just because it's summer. For more than a decade, the city's Department of Cultural Affairs has been offering free downtown performances of operatic rarities performed by Chicago-area professional singers in Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Writing a new opera these days is a task that comes with big hopes and more often than not, even bigger disappointments. (Just ask Rufus Wainwright, Tan Dun and Howard Shore.)
The latest world premiere to hit the opera circuit is "The Letter," a partial adaptation of the the W. Somerset Maugham play of the same name, now running at Santa Fe Opera House. Composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout have fashioned a noir murder-mystery about the wife of a British plantation owner in Malaysia who shoots her lover and tries to cover up her affair.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

When Culture Monster last chatted with composer Stephen Schwartz ("Wicked," "Enchanted," "Pippin"), it was January, and a new production of "Pippin" performed by Deaf West Theater was onstage at the Mark Taper Forum.
Now, the Oscar and Grammy-winning Schwartz has something completely new to announce: his first opera, intriguingly titled "Seance on a Wet Afternoon," which will have its world premiere Sept. 26 at the Granada in Santa Barbara. The opera, which also will have two performances in October, is being produced by Opera Santa Barbara and executive-produced by Michael Jackowitz.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

After presenting operas and classic musicals outdoors in the stately boxwood gardens of President James Monroe's Ash Lawn-Highland estate for three decades, Ash Lawn Opera is playing its 31st season indoors on the Paramount Theater stage at the heart of the Downtown Mall.
— Read more at Richmond Times-Dispatch

When Emily Hagen was tossing around ideas for her upcoming production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," Jack Bowman thought of a setting that already had the right ambience.
Why not stage it Glensheen, the historic Congdon Estate?
— Read more at Duluth News Tribune

Joyce Castle, Anna Christy, Joyce DiDonato, Lauren Flanigan, Anthony Dean Griffey, Samuel Ramey, and members of New York City Ballet will perform at New York City Opera's American Voices program on November 5, which will kick off its 2009-2010 season, its first under artistic director George Steel.
— Read more at TheaterMania.com

Opera noir?
The hybrid form seems like a natural.
After all, opera is ideally suited to melodrama, as any number of beloved classics attest, and it meshes easily with such noir necessities as a femme fatale, a sensational crime and moody lighting.
If the creators of "The Letter," which had its world premiere Saturday evening at the Santa Fe Opera, did not invent opera noir, they certainly give the concept a big boost.
— Read more at The Denver Post

It looks like those of us in L.A. who want to experience Esa-Pekka Salonen's much-anticipated debut at the Metropolitan Opera in November are going to have to buy a plane ticket to New York.
The opera company told Culture Monster that it won't broadcast Leos Janacek's "From the House of the Dead" to movie theaters as part of its Live in HD series. Salonen, who is ending his tenure as the L.A. Philharmonic's music director, is scheduled to conduct the opera for seven performances in New York starting Nov. 12.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

The summer activities of the Merola Opera Program provide a perfect opportunity for discovery - and as long as we're being introduced to gifted young singers, why not some unfamiliar repertoire as well?
That seemed to be the thinking behind last weekend's superb production of Mascagni's opera "L'Amico Fritz," given two performances at the Cowell Theater. This 1891 romantic comedy, written the year after the composer's sensational success with "Cavalleria Rusticana," is known to most opera lovers by name only - it's rarely, if ever, performed.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Metropolitan Opera will present a free outdoor Summer HD Festival featuring ten of its award winning productions from the popular The Met: Live in HD series. The HD performances will be shown on a giant screen in front of the opera house in Lincoln Center Plaza for ten consecutive nights Saturday, August 29 through Monday, September 7. The nightly screenings begin between 7:30pm and 8:00pm and are open to the public with no tickets required; 3,000 seats will be available in the Plaza each night on a first-come, first served basis.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

Back in the 1960s and '70s, when Italian opera was deemed a capitalist indulgence in China, no work was more despised than Giacomo Puccini's "Turandot." Many Chinese thought the opera insulting, with its depiction of a despotic Chinese princess who has her suitors beheaded unless they can answer three riddles.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

The ultra-exclusive Salzburg Festival is to reach out to a wider audience this year by webcasting one of its opera performances for the first time, organisers announced Tuesday.
The premiere of a new production of Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" will be available online on Thursday, just hours after the actual performance, said the festival's main sponsor, German electronic giant Siemens.
— Read more at Yahoo!7 News

Calgary playwright and director John Murrell has written an English-language libretto for Leos Janacek's opera The Story of Sharp Ears the Fox (or The Cunning Little Vixen).
The family opera will premiere in English for the first time at the Banff Centre for the Arts in August.
— Read more at cbc.ca

In her inaugural season as a director of the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, Katharina Wagner was booed by audience members when she took the stage at the end of a production of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" on Sunday, Agence France-Presse reported.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The management of the Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee held a meeting at Catalano Square on Friday with artists, subscribers and board members who have been frustrated with the cascade of controversies that followed the theater's firing of its longtime artistic director, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The last thing you need is a voiceless tenor on opening night of Verdi's troubled political thriller Un Ballo in Maschera. The pivotal role of Gustavus III, assassinated at a masked ball in the Royal Opera House, Stockholm, in 1792, has been much beloved of big stars throughout its chequered history. Rafael Rojas is hardly that but David Rendall has been and together they rescued a near-disaster, Rendall singing from the pit, Rojas moving and mouthing furiously on stage.
— Read more at The Independent

This September, San Francisco Opera celebrates the inaugural season of incoming Music Director Nicola Luisotti. One of the most charismatic and sought after conductors of our time and beloved by singers and orchestras around the world, Maestro Luisotti leads four productions in his inaugural season with the Company: Il Trovatore, Salome, Otello and The Girl of the Golden West.
— Read more at San Francisco Sentinel

If you harbor any doubts about the ability of early opera to engage your senses the way the works of, say, Mozart, Verdi and Puccini do, you could get an easy attitude adjustment from a trip to the Barns at Wolf Trap. There, Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses is receiving a dynamic production from the Wolf Trap Opera Company. The final performance is Tuesday night.
— Read more at Tim Smith - The Baltimore Sun

When John Crosby founded the summer opera company here in 1957, he came up into the hills north of town and fired a gun to find a setting with the perfect acoustics and the right echo.
Shots were fired again Saturday night, opening the world premiere of the opera "The Letter." But they sounded a little flimsy, as if fired from a cap gun. The opera could have offered a lot more bang for the buck.
— Read more at Anne Midgette - washingtonpost.com

Warren Jones conducted Mascagni's charming wine country love story, L'Amico Fritz, for the first time this weekend as the Merolini of San Francisco Opera performed the fully staged opera at Cowell Theater at Fort Mason.
"Who has ever heard of this?" asked a delighted woman after the performance. "How about the two leads?" she continued happily. "You could just see them falling in love."
— Read more at examiner.com

Gian Carlo Menotti's chilling portrayal of the authoritarian state is as timely today as it was when it premiered on Broadway in 1950. The Consul ran for an astounding 269 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and won for him both a Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best musical play.
It's an opera that works well at Glimmerglass, where it opened on Saturday night, July 25th. The 900-seat house puts the audience right in the ghastly waiting room of the unseen Consul, as desperate petitioners wait, and wait, and wait some more for a precious visa that will permit them to flee the country.
— Read more at David Abrams - blog.cnycafemomus.com

The board of the Skylight Opera Theatre, embroiled in its own internal drama for the past several weeks following the firing of the company's artistic director, has retained managing director Eric Dillner but accepted the resignation of board president Suzanne Hefty at a four-hour emergency board meeting Thursday night.
— Read more at The Business Journal of Milwaukee:

Boxes lining the walls read: "Socks and knee highs." "Leotards and unitards." "Pantyhose." Busy crew members scurry up and down stairs as costumers sew and fit fabric and ribbons onto waiting busts.
This is where Cassidy Brettler is spending her summer - in a cavernous basement warehouse in the South Lake Union neighborhood where booming echoes of song waft toward tall ceilings.
— Read more at Seattle Times

Gunshots. A dead lover. A cigarette-puffing leading lady whose neck could end up in a noose. Welcome to "opera noir."
The Santa Fe Opera's latest original offering, "The Letter," is classic opera mayhem in a compact, stylish package.
— Read more at The Associated Press

The annual Bayreuth opera festival opened under new management on Saturday, with composer Richard Wagner's great-granddaughters in charge for the first time after their father ran the show for more than 50 years.
Half-sisters Katharina Wagner, 31, and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 64, welcomed luminaries such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel - a regular pilgrim to Bayreuth - and Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer to the Festspielhaus.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Gioachino Rossini might have had a great career in 1930s Hollywood. Kevin Newbury certainly makes a strong case for that with his stylish production of "La Cenerentola," Rossini's re-imagining of the Cinderella fairy tale, for Glimmerglass Opera that opened at the Alice Busch Opera Theater last Sunday afternoon.
— Read more at examiner.com

The 89th Salzburg Festival was officially opened on Saturday by Austrian President Heinz Fischer, with Handel's opera "Theodora" kicking off a month of music and drama later in the day.
Austrian leaders turned up en masse at the opening, led by Fischer and his guest, Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva, on an official visit to Austria.
— Read more at AFP

Following its triumphant new productions of The Fairy Queen and Rusalka, Glyndebourne comes back to earth with a mildly enjoyable but unremarkable revival of Donizetti's innocent bucolic comedy L'Elisir d'Amore. What a brilliantly constructed opera it is - not a wasted note or a dud number, and all over in a blessed two hours. Rossini never achieved anything so neatly assured and precise.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

This final performance of the Royal Opera's 2008-09 season brought to the stage Nelly Miricioiu, the second of two Romanian sopranos to replace an ailing Deborah Voigt in the title role of Puccini's Tosca. Miricioiu's experience in this part speaks for itself: she appeared in the 1996, 2001 and 2004 revivals of the previous production and, if I'm not wrong, had now become the only person to have played Tosca in both stagings.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

A new generation of Wagners is at the helm as the annual Bayreuth festival opens this weekend, with composer Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter saying that she hopes to help bring "opera to the people."
— Read more at The Associated Press

The world-renowned Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, once dubbed "the Elvis of opera", has been ordered to pay his former wife a bigger share of his yearly 1.8 million [pounds] earnings.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

From his corner office at the top floor of the new administrative building behind the Munich Opera, Nikolaus Bachler, the artistic and managing director of the Bavarian State Opera, overlooks the Royal Stables Plaza. Once an urban dead spot, the square is slowly transforming into a lively node between the English Garden, the Max Planck Institute, and the backside of the Opera house.
— Read more at Deutsche Welle

This weekend may prove to be the choicest moment of summer opera in the East Bay, indoors and out-and over a span of millennia, from ancient Rome through the 18th century to the present day. Two adventuresome independent local companies, Open Opera and Oakland Opera Theater, will stage, respectively, Mozart's most famous opera, The Marriage of Figaro in period dress, outdoors (and free) in John Hinkel Park, and a "a post-modern view" of Handel's opera on its 300th anniversary, Agrippina 2000, American Emperor at their Oakland Metro Operahouse near Jack London Square.
— Read more at The Berkeley Daily Planet

Last night before the sold-out opening performance of Cincinnati Opera's performance of Carmen, soprano Margaret Russo was named the winner of the first "Opera Idol" contest. Russo - a 25-year-old copywriter from Zionsville, Ind. - will receive a $3,500 contract with Cincinnati Opera.

— Read more at citybeat.com

Baltimore Opera Theatre, the organization recently formed by impesarios Giorgio Lalov and Jenny Kelly, will hold open auditions for comprimario roles in The Barber of Seville and Rigoletto. Those two productions are scheduled to be presented at the Hippodrome during BOT's inaugural season.
— Read more at Tim Smith - The Baltimore Sun

If Jonathan Miller's new production of La Traviata proves anything, it's that if push comes to shove, a "fallen woman" can stand on her own.
Glimmerglass Opera's 2009 season-opening performance of the Verdi masterpiece was visually appealing and, on the whole, musically satisfying. The production will most likely be remembered, however, for the powerful combination of acting and singing by Mary Dunleavy as the tragic heroine, Violetta - a performance so outstanding, in fact, few other cast members were able to keep up with her.
— Read more at David Abrams - cnycafemomus.com

The last thing you need is a voiceless tenor on opening night of Verdi's troubled political thriller Un ballo in maschera.
The pivotal role of Gustavus III, assassinated at a masked ball in the Royal Opera House, Stockholm, in 1792, has been much beloved of big stars throughout its chequered history. Rafael Rojas is hardly that but David Rendall has been and together they rescued a near-disaster, Rendall singing from the pit, Rojas moving and mouthing furiously on stage.
— Read more at The Independent

The crowd for a recent Saturday evening performance of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore at Caramoor Center for Music and Arts, in lush Katonah, N.Y., was older and whiter even than a typical audience at the Metropolitan Opera (and that is pretty darn old and white).
— Read more at Zachary Woolfe - The New York Observer

The LA Board of Supervisors met today to discuss Mike Antonovich's motion "requesting that the [LA Ring] Festival shift the focus from honoring Wagner to featuring other composers as headliners." Since I've already commented at length about this subject (here, here, here and here!)I thought I was finished with it. But sadly I'm not.
— Read more at Mark Rudio - examiner.com

Imagine that Frederick Loewe, aspiring to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, removed all the dialogue from My Fair Lady and reworked the musical into a grand opera.
That, in essence, is what happened with Marina, a rarely heard Spanish opera that will be performed July 30 and Aug. 1 by the Miami Lyric Opera, a young company that compensates for low-budget sets with excellent singing.
— Read more at South Florida Classical Review

Brother, can you spare a dime? Well, hold on to your change: Glimmerglass Opera's new production of Rossini's La Cenerentola, set here in Depression-era America circa 1933, creates a "New Deal" of its own - forging a stimulus package that generates outstanding individual and ensemble singing, snappy stage action and cleverly synchronized comedic interplay of characters that at times may have you wondering whether you're watching opera or a Marx Brothers film.
— Read more at David Abrams - cnycafemomus.com

The Merola Opera Program presents Pietro Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz July 24th and July 26th at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center. L'Amico Fritz is Mascagni's second opera following the world-wide success of Cavalleria Rusticana. In the leading roles are tenor Nathaniel Peake (second year with Merola) as "Fritz Kobus", baritone Alexsey Bogdanov as "Rabbi David" and soprano Sara Gartland as "Suzel". Conductor Warren Jones will lead members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra in this black box theatre production directed by Nic Muni. This will be Warren Jones' first time conducting L'Amico Fritz.
— Read more at San Francisco Sentinel

Julie Taymor's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute and Bartlett Sher's staging of Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia will both return to the big screen in the theaters around the country this summer, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera's The Met: Live in HD series.
— Read more at TheaterMania.com

It's not often that city politicians take the time to publicly debate the merits of a classical music composer, but that's exactly what happened today when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted on a motion concerning the fate of the 2010 Ring Festival L.A., a citywide arts celebration focused on Richard Wagner's epic cycle "The Ring of the Nibelung."
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

The former artistic director of Milwaukee's Skylight Opera Theatre said he would not direct shows there on a freelance basis, and several performers resigned or withdrew from productions after two actors were fired by the theater, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

As this year's Munich Opera Festival enters its home stretch, we offer a 2-part interview with General Manager Nikolaus Bachler. The Austrian-born impresario has been making waves since his 2008 arrival and, as you will see, he pulls no punches in conversation.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

In May, he wanted to make a statement by using a live elephant in the Pensacola Opera's over-the-top production of Aida - which was a celebration of the opening of the Saenger Theatre and the 25th anniversary of the opera company.
"The truly, truly big opera houses in the world will use an elephant (in the production)," said the general and creative director of Pensacola Opera. "While most people may have thought, 'Oh no, we're too small. We're just Pensacola,' it's my belief that we need to reach beyond where our hands can normally reach."
— Read more at Pensacola News Journal

Cassandra Tilly has always been singing.
It used to get her in trouble - singing at the dinner table. It later got her into college at Rice University and, since moving to Fairbanks a decade ago, fueled an interest in founding a professional opera company here.
— Read more at newsminer.com

Browsing through Opera Chic's exemplary blog this morning, I was faced with some truly revolting photos of David Pountney's production of King Roger at Bregenz, conducted by Mark Elder. Which put me in the mood for a little childish summery thought: what is the most utterly stomach-churning opera production you have ever seen? A contender for ickiness might be Glyndebourne's current, brilliant Rusalka, directed by Melly Still (there are still tickets left, and if you want to treat yourself this summer, then I strongly suggest you go).
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Tony Award nominee Diane Paulus, director of the Tony-winning Best Revival Hair, will helm Joseph Haydn's opera Il mondo della luna, to be staged at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium. The production, presented by the Gotham Chamber Opera in partnership with the museum and association with American Repertory Theater, will run from January 19 through January 28, 2010.
— Read more at Broadway.com

Madison Opera officials are in tune with who's who among rising stars. They attend auditions from St. Louis to New York. They see numerous productions. They have a network of nationwide colleagues who suggest notable newcomers and established vocalists. Together, they listen to hundreds of artists.
— Read more at 77square.com

The many great sopranos who have portrayed La Traviata's Violetta Valery have differed in both physical type and stage presence; likewise, the garments made for Violetta have varied significantly throughout the opera's long history. Much of this is owing to Violetta's complex persona, perhaps best summarized by Renee Fleming: "Despite her profession of courtesan, she possesses more integrity than any of the other characters in the opera." Since a costume designer's most basic and challenging task is to define a character clearly through dress, Violetta's clothes must convey both virtue and sex appeal, as well as be appropriate to the circumstances of her profession.
— Read more at Opera News

Edna Garabedian, Fresno's indefatigable and resourceful diva, has a way of making the longest of odds seem like no big deal.
"There are 6,000 opera singers to every one job," she says matter-of-factly during a rehearsal break at her California Opera Association Arts and Education Festival, which continues through Aug. 2. When she speaks, her exquisite enunciation and breath control, honed after a life-long immersion in opera, give even a somber statement such as this a slightly cheery, musical lilt. "It's a hard life. People make tremendous sacrifices."
— Read more at fresnobee.com

There is a moment in Rossini's jovial opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia when the heroine, Rosina, complains that she has cramp in her foot - and the line has never seemed more appropriate than this week at Covent Garden. Joyce DiDonato, the US mezzo-soprano who performs the part for the last time in the run tonight, would have achieved wonderful reviews for her voice alone: luscious and clear, with a freshness that filled the theatre.
— Read more at The Guardian

Many opera stars learn to juggle family life with the theater. But not many kids get to be on the stage with their mom - in this case, Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose - as she stars in one of the most celebrated operas of all time, "Carmen."
Donose, who will sing the role of the beautiful gypsy in Cincinnati Opera's production of Bizet's tuneful masterpiece, opening Wednesday in Music Hall, is in town with her husband, opera director Peter Pawlik, and their two children, Max, 8, and Anna, almost 6. For the first time, her children will be appearing with her onstage in costume as supernumeraries - extras - during the performance.
— Read more at Cincinnati.Com

Soprano Mary Dunleavy will make her Glimmerglass Opera debut as Violetta Valery, the celebrated but consumptive courtesan of the Parisian demimonde who's given a second chance to die loved, in Jonathan Miller's mounting of Verdi's "La Traviata" Saturday night at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown, N.Y.
— Read more at examiner.com

The rules for producing Puccini's "Turandot" are simple and well known: You don't tackle the piece unless you have a soprano fully capable of singing the grueling title role. Fortunately, the folks at Festival Opera observe that precept faithfully.
The company's new production of Puccini's bloody final work, playing at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, has its ups and downs, but in soprano Othalie Graham it can boast a leading lady of prodigious vocal and dramatic force. And without the right Turandot, there's no "Turandot."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Opera Omaha will begin a weeklong summer workshop for kids Aug. 3 to provide an opportunity to learn about the many disciplines that make up the art form of opera.
Professionals from Opera Omaha, The KANEKO and The Institute for Holocaust Education will teach the students acting, improvisation and teamwork. The class will be taught through rehearsing and presenting scenes from classic operas such as Carmen, The Barber of Seville, and Hansel and Gretel
— Read more at . omahanewsstand.com

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich called for Los Angeles Opera -- which is scheduled to mount Wagner's four-opera "Ring" cycle next spring as well as coordinate a citywide festival on the "Ring" -- to "delete the focus on Wagner." He asks this on the grounds that Wagner was a racist and anti-Semite whose music Hitler enjoyed and employed to his own ends. In addition to Wagner, the supervisor suggests we turn to, among others, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Schumann, great composers who never properly mastered opera.
— Read more at Mark Swed - Los Angeles Times

Angeleno Opera enthusiasts have been anticipating the long-planned Ring Festival LA, which will span multiple venues between mid-April and late June of 2010 and boast numerous performances by different organizations, each "providing its own unique point of view on the influences of [composer Richard] Wagner's art and philosophy from the 19th century to the present day," explains the LA Opera.
— Read more at LAist.com

Bill Theisen, the Skylight Opera Theatre artistic director who was cut loose in a budget-trimming measure in June, was asked by the board to return to his post. He has declined the offer.
On July 9, the board of the Milwaukee company devoted to musicals and operas, announced that it had "established communications with Bill Theisen regarding the role of artistic director at the Skylight" and that Theisen "has decided not to accept the board's offer to return to the Skylight Opera Theatre for the 50th anniversary season as artistic director.
— Read more at Playbill News

In the summer of 1967, after the first season at its new Lincoln Center house, the Metropolitan Opera inaugurated its Met in the Parks program, presenting concert performances of complete operas with leading singers and the Met orchestra. Eventually these tours took opera to parks in every borough as well as New Jersey.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Merola Opera Program presents Pietro Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz July 24 and July 26 at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center. Tickets are affordably priced ranging from $60, $40 and with a special student price of $25.
In the leading roles are tenor Nathaniel Peake (in his second year at Merola) as Fritz Kobus, baritone Alexsey Bogdanov as Rabbi David and soprano Sara Gartland as Suzel.
— Read more at examiner.com

Three weeks ago Lorin Maazel conducted the final concerts of his seven-year term as music director of the New York Philharmonic. He has now returned to his 550-acre estate in Rappahannock County, Virginia, but is hardly enjoying a quiet retirement. This month on the estate, which is also a working farm, he launched the Castleton Festival, a 16-day event built around four chamber operas by Benjamin Britten.
— Read more at FT.com

One reliable offering among the impressive variety of free concerts each summer in New York is the indefatigable New York Grand Opera Company, which (despite falling donations) continues to present staged productions at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Before the premiere of Rufus Wainwright's first opera, "Prima Donna," as part of the Manchester International Festival at the Palace Theater on Friday evening, Mr. Wainwright dropped hints that he would show up costumed as a famous operatic figure. Sure enough, while a crowd milled in the lobby before the performance, Mr. Wainwright arrived meticulously made up as Verdi, in a formal 19th-century black suit, complete with white silk scarf, black top hat and a bushy beard grown for the occasion.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The very first thing that appears on stage in Prima Donna is the title character herself, in a still image on a screen, her eyes closed and mouth open wide. Is she singing or screaming? Pain or ecstasy? It could be either, because she is star of the opera, where moments of joy and sorrow are separated only by a few breaths.
There's no shortage of emotion in Prima Donna, as you might expect from the first opera by Rufus Wainwright, who does nothing by half-notes. Strings soar, teeth are gnashed, heroines throw themselves across beds; it's not opera, it's Opera It makes for a thoroughly entertaining, if slightly barmy, evening.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright says opera saved his life more than once, and he has begun to pay it back with his first full-length work "Prima Donna". Skip related content
With trademark flamboyance, a bearded Wainwright dressed up as 19th century composer Verdi, complete with long black coat and top hat, for the opening night in Manchester, England, last Friday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News UK

La Cieca, the indomitable voice of the entertaining, ever-so-bitchy blog Parterre Box, makes an astute comment about Prima Donna, the first opera by moody-voiced singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright: ...
— Read more at Tim Smith - baltimoresun.com

AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) "a valuable company [that] offers a chance to look in on operas in progress by talented composers." (The New Yorker) will begin its 21st season of commissioning, developing and presenting new opera and musical works this fall. From its home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, AOP will continue to open up the artistic process to audiences with dozens of libretto readings and concert workshops throughout the year. The 2009-2010 season will also feature two world premieres of AOP-developed projects produced by other companies -- Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the first opera by composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell), at Opera Santa Barbara in September 2009 and Jorge Martin's Before Night Falls at Fort Worth Opera in May 2010.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera for the last three seasons, got a big raise last year. For the fiscal year that ended last July - encompassing Mr. Gelb's second full season on the job - his total compensation was $1.5 million, a 36 percent increase from a year before, according to a report by Bloomberg News that cited the company's latest tax return. Mr. Gelb, 55, a former record executive, took over from Joseph Volpe in the fall of 2006 with aggressive marketing plans to draw new audiences,
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Dame's operatic silence seems to have come to an end. Kiri Te Kanawa, one of the most beloved opera stars of the last forty years, has confirmed in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times that she will appear at the New York Met and Oper Koln in 2010, finally marking her return to the opera stage after six years of absence.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Ushering in a new era for San Francisco Opera, Nicola Luisotti begins his inaugural year as music director on Friday, September 11 at the historic War Memorial Opera House with Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore, featuring an all-star cast that includes Sondra Radvanovsky, Stephanie Blythe, Marco Berti, and Dmitri Hvorostovky. Highlights of the City's fall cultural season, San Francisco Opera's opening-night festivities include San Francisco Opera Guild's Opera Ball 2009: A Gala Benefit in Support of Opera Education and BRAVO! CLUB'S Opening Night Gala.
— Read more at examiner.com

There's a scene in "The Godfather Part III" in which Michael Corleone's son makes his operatic debut. The work was "Cavalleria Rusticana," and it depicted quintessential Italian opera.
The July 10 Utah Festival Opera performance of this masterpiece by Pietro Mascagni, on a double-bill with Ruggero Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci," imparted the same experience -- visceral and authentic. The company's artistic staff masterfully recreated the unrestrained emotionalism of verismo operatic style with a cast of formidable singers that nailed the audience to their seats with their vocal prowess.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

Germany's Bayreuth opera festival looked set on Tuesday to be hit by its first-ever strike after marathon pay talks between unions representing stage and technical staff and management collapsed.
After almost 17 hours of wrangling ended without result in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Verdi union warned that unless there was a "much better" pay offer it would not return to the negotiating table.
— Read more at AFP

Deborah Voigt's withdrawal due to illness from this revival of Jonathan Kent's 2006 production leaves the field open for two Romanian divas to share the title role: Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miricioiu. Gheorghiu took the first night, returning to a staging she helped create when it was new.
— Read more at The Guardian

British conductor Edward Downes, a longtime stalwart at the Royal Opera and maestro of the first-ever performance at Sydney's iconic Opera House, has died with his wife Joan at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. He was 85 and she was 74.
— Read more at The Associated Press

The opera talker of the summer, Rufus Wainwright's "Prima Donna" is set to open today at the Manchester International Festival. The new piece is Wainwright's first stab at the operatic form and will be performed entirely in French, to boot.
Precious little of the score has been revealed publicly, but a video of Wainwright performing an aria from "Prima Donna" has been circulating on YouTube. Recorded during a concert in France, the video shows the Canadian pop star introducing (in French) the aria, titled "Le feu d'artifice t'appelle" ("The fireworks are calling you") and performing the number as he accompanies himself on the piano.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

The Royal Opera's 2008-9 season ends in a blaze of glory with a superb revival. Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia will never feature in a list of my thousand favourite operas, but in a performance as delicious as this was, even I couldn't resist its charms. Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser's production is cheerful, colourful and innocently gay, while Antonio Pappano's conducting was light-fingered and zippy. And I mustn't forget Changhan Lim and Jennifer Rhys-Davies, excellent in the small but telling roles of Fiorello and Berta.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Jonathan Kent's 2006 production of Tosca replaced the classic Zeffirelli staging, created for Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, that had served since 1964. The sighs of relief that Kent's was a safe non-interventionist production were audible and indeed there are few original touches.
The starlight over the execution courtyard, in an electric black sky that finally reveals a giant symbolic wing, is an exception. Paul Brown's handsome, ingenious sets, skilfully lit by Mark Henderson, certainly provide an atmospheric backdrop.
— Read more at This is London

A FIRM believer in her own virtues, she may be the diva's diva, but Angela Gheorghiu's one previous outing as Tosca - here, in 2006 - fell curiously flat.
So there's been much brouhaha about the temperamental Romanian's return to the scene of the crime (though in covering for Deborah Voigt she's saving the show, not flouncing off it): would she clear her name on a second hearing and do justice to Puccini's tragic songbird?
— Read more at thelondonpaper.com

As arts organizations around the country are forced to shut their doors, Opera New Jersey is opening its doors wider.
This season, the ambitious 5-year-old company will move two of its three productions from the smaller of the McCarter Theatre spaces, the 360-seat Berlind Theatre, to the 1,100-seat Matthews Theatre. While the company has trimmed the overall number of performances from upward of 14 to 10, the move has allowed it to increase its audience capacity by 30 percent, according to artistic director Scott Altman.
— Read more at NJ.com

CASTING an opera singer in a leading role for an important production, no matter how dependable the singer, is always a "calculated risk," Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said recently from France. Only select artists can perform the most demanding roles in opera at the highest level, and they have to be booked years in advance.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Since his debut roughly a decade ago, singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has attracted a following for his lush, romantic pop songs. He ventures into new territory this month with the premiere of his first opera, "Prima Donna."
Set in Paris in the 1970s, the opera, which opens Friday night at the Manchester International Festival, chronicles an eventful day in the life of an aging soprano as she contemplates a comeback.
— Read more at WSJ.com

After nearly five years at the helm of the Long Leaf Opera, Jim Schaeffer has stepped down from his post as executive director.
He will now focus full-time on his other position - general director of New York's Center for Contemporary Opera, which he has held since March 2008. For the past year, Schaeffer had been handling dual responsibilities and traveling extensively to the Big Apple. "I'd just gotten myself too busy," Schaeffer says.
— Read more at Triangle Business Journal

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has always been an unclassifiable talent but now comes an even bigger departure - a full-length opera.
The opera entitled Prima Donna is his first and was initially announced for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Merolini are tough. The young artists selected for training and performances with the 52-year-old San Francisco Opera Merola Program exhibit ability, talent, gumption, hard work and iron will to overcome great physical challenges.
Ruth Ann Swenson (Merola 1981-82) continued her international career in 2006 while undergoing chemotherapy, resuming performances after surgery.
— Read more at San Francisco Examiner

The struggling New York City Opera should take heart from its "people's opera" counterpart in London, the English National Opera. Not so long ago the English National was similarly mired in an artistic, administrative and financial crisis. But under the leadership of John Berry, as artistic director, and Edward Gardner, as music director, the company has rebounded. It now draws large audiences to innovative productions at its meticulously restored home here, the old Coliseum Theater, originally a variety hall.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Much of the world may have been watching the obsequies for Michael Jackson, which were also shown live on French television, but a different kind of artistic farewell also took place here on Tuesday night: the premiere of a theatrical work by the German painter Anselm Kiefer, the last commission of Gerard Mortier's tenure as director of the Paris Opera.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

"It wasn't my intention to get notoriety," James Jorden said. It was a sunny morning, and he was sitting at a cafe near his home in Woodside, Queens, where he lives with his partner, Carl ("Queens is where all the queens are going now," he says).
As an avid reader of his Web site about opera, Parterre Box, which is overseen by his alter ego, La Cieca, an imperious, loud, snarky, attention-grabbing persona named after the blind, wronged mother in the opera La Gioconda, I was half-expecting to meet the extravagantly made-up, bizarrely clothed La Cieca when I came here.
— Read more at Zachary Woolfe - The New York Observer

In most circumstances, consigning the heroine of Rossini's ll Barbiere di Siviglia to a wheelchair would count as cranky post-modernism. Last night at the Royal Opera House, it was stark necessity.
On Saturday the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato was singing the role of Rosina. Everything went swimmingly until, just after her showpiece aria, she slipped and twisted her ankle; or so she thought.
— Read more at This is London See also: http://yankeediva.blogspot.com/

Natalie Dessay, the French soprano celebrated for a remarkable high-flying soprano that has long been her stock-in-trade as well as for her uncommonly sophisticated acting chops, has been receiving glowing notices from the local and national press since beginning performances on July 3.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Ferruccio Furlanetto is still buzzing. "What a sensational night," he says, of the opening performance of The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House on Saturday. "The atmosphere is still electric here."
With its cast headed by the young Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez, the show was always going to be a sell-out. But what Covent Garden could not have bargained for was just how outstanding the rest of its stars would prove - nor how much publicity they would get after the US mezzo Joyce DiDonato broke her leg and kept going.
— Read more at The Guardian

The Minnesota Opera broke even in 2009, as it filled more seats per performance than it did during the same period last year and met its revenue goals.
— Read more at St. Paul Business Journal

As previously reported on PlaybillArts and all around the web, the opera star broke her fibula early in the opening show, completing that performance on crutches.
A later trip to the hospital revealed the more serious injury, which calls for her to be confined to a chair while the bone heals.
— Read more at PlaybillArts See also: http://yankeediva.blogspot.com/

On Saturday night at the Royal Opera House here, the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato brought literal meaning to the old theatrical motto "Break a leg."
Singing Rosina in the company's production of Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia," the first of six performances, Ms. DiDonato had just finished the character's scintillating signature aria in Act I, "Una voce poco fa," when she slipped onstage and badly injured her right leg. It turned out to be a fractured fibula. All she knew at the time was that she was in excruciating pain.
— Read more at NYTimes.com See also: http://yankeediva.blogspot.com/

Posters of Renee Fleming appear to be everywhere here. She has been singing Violetta in Verdi's "Traviata" at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the six-performance run, which ended on Monday night, was sold out.
Understandably. I attended that final "Traviata," and as a longtime Fleming watcher, I can report that she was at her best in this vocally alluring and dramatically insightful Violetta.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

A couple of weeks ago, Romanian-born British soprano Nelly Miricioiu had no particular plans for the beginning of July. Then late one night, an apparent miracle happened: she received a call from the Royal Opera, asking whether she would like to take over the role of Puccini's Tosca from an ailing Deborah Voigt. She'll sing the part at the performances on 11 and 18 July, with the others being taken by her compatriot Angela Gheorghiu; the stellar cast also includes tenor Marcello Giordani and Bryn Terfel.
— Read more at musicalcriticism.com

Discovering opera was the most important thing to happen to the 2009 Montreal International Music Competition Grand Prize and People's Choice Award winner Angela Meade. Although the large-voiced American soprano sang in elementary school, high school, and church choirs, taking up solos all the while, opera and classical music was far from her culture. "My mom had always wanted to be a Christian music singer and was even offered a contract," said the ever-smiling Meade. "Singing pop didn't fit my life and singing country and western didn't fit my voice."
— Read more at scena.org

Hey, Anna! Hey, Renee! There's a new Violetta in town, and she's staking a compelling claim to the role, orange wig and all.
Natalie Dessay, the French soprano best known for her stratospheric coloratura skills, opened the Santa Fe Opera's 2009 season Friday night with her first-ever performance as the doomed heroine of Verdi's "La Traviata," one of the classic roles of the lyric repertory.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

It's nearly midnight in Spoleto, but James Conlon is still going strong. He has been busy rehearsing Woody Allen's zany production of Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" practically non-stop at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in this medieval town in central Italy, which is perched on an Umbrian hill clad in pine and olive trees.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Fans arriving at the Royal Opera House in London for tomorrow's performance of Rossini's The Barber of Seville are in for a surprise when the curtain goes up.
In addition to the expected star cast, headed by the great Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez, they will see an unexpected performance by a star in a cast, after the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato decided to go ahead with her performance, despite fracturing her leg during Saturday's first night.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

It helps to have a masterpiece as your starting point - and Dvorak's Rusalka is certainly that - but when you've a director as painfully honest and unpretentious as Melly Still and a conductor, in Jiri Belohlavek, whose intent is not merely to conduct the piece but to honour it as a treasured part of his heritage, then we're talking a very special alchemy around what we hear, see, and feel.
— Read more at The Independent

After writing about Baltimore's operatic future in early May, I received a thought-provoking, extraordinarily detailed analysis from a couple of opera lovers in Annapolis, Jan and Ellen Richter. My column in the July 5 Sun refers to the ideas the Richters raised for building here something along the lines of the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. It's pretty easy to get caught up in their enthusiasm, and I can already envision such a company blossoming here, either downtown in an intimate place like Centerstage, or in Towson at Goucher College (an environment not unlike the campus where OTSL performs.)
— Read more at Tim Smith - The Baltimore Sun

When people say "break a leg" to a singer, they don't mean it literally. That was no comfort to American mezzo Joyce DiDonato, who broke her fibia during a show at London's Royal Opera House on Saturday.
After having received rapturous applause for her fiery entrance aria in Rossini's comedy "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," DiDonato stumbled when walking across the stage. A few moments later, she left the set, returned with a stick and carried on performing. It looked like she had sprained her ankle.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

They say it's more sacred to give than to receive. Ask Stephen Llewellyn: It's a lot more fun, too.
...
It all started with a hot shower in Portland. Stephen, who writes the Operaman blog for the Portland Opera, was shampooing his hair, he says, and thinking about a competition created by a Canadian classical music blogger named Marcia Adair for her blog, The Omniscient Mussel.
— Read more at OregonLive.com

When the Colorado Light Opera was formed in 1979, its co-founders in CU's College of Music envisioned the summertime festival as a recruiting tool.
Students would come to Boulder to sing, act and play music for the summer, CLO founders hoped, fall in love with the university in the shadow of the flatirons and stay for their education.
— Read more at ColoradoDaily.com

No, I haven't stopped thinking about Baltimore's opera future. And, thanks to some others in the area similarly focused, I've got a lot more to think about.
Last week, Giorgio Lalov and Jenny Kelly announced the debut season of their Baltimore Opera Theatre at the Hippodrome - Rossini's The Barber of Seville in November and Verdi's Rigoletto in March.
— Read more at Tim Smith - baltimoresun.com

Even if they have never heard of George Frideric Handel, most people are aware of the composer's great Christmas and Easter oratorio, "Messiah," or, at the very least, its Hallelujah Chorus.
But Handel was no one-hit wonder.
This year, the classical music world is marking the 250th anniversary of the celebrated baroque master, who wrote music in virtually every form, including a prodigious group of operas - 49 to be exact.
— Read more at The Denver Post

Sandra Warfield, an American mezzo-soprano who performed frequently with the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s, '60s and early '70s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 88 and lived on the Upper East Side.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

It just goes by too fast.
The 2009 season of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which opened with Puccini's "La Boheme" on May 23, closed on June 28 with one final incendiary performance of Richard Strauss' "Salome."
— Read more at STLtoday.com

If you could see Kaija Saariaho's undulating and deeply sensuous music it would look pretty much like Daniele Finzi Pasca's staging of her first opera L'Amour de loin (Love from afar).
This whole show is designed to waft us into submission, its washes of constantly evolving orchestral texture reflected on stage in Cirque du Soleil like dreamscapes of flying acrobatics and billowing silks. Beautiful but precious - which is ultimately the opera's problem, too. This is a piece which rejoices in the old adage that it is better to journey than to arrive. Its fulfilment is as nothing compared to its promise.
— Read more at The Independent

Lake George Opera opened its season Thursday night at the Spa Little Theatre with a visually beautiful and sensationally sung production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly."
Soprano Yunah Lee as Cio Cio San (Butterfly) was stunning. Her voice was glorious as it soared in Puccini's gorgeous melodies.
— Read more at dailygazette.com

It's nice to be reminded once in a while why certain works are masterpieces brought back again and again. Pre-performance talks and smart program notes can't do it, nor can even the best vintage recordings. It takes the thrill of a top-quality, live production and that's just what the Lake George Opera at Saratoga delivers with Puccini's "Madama Butterfly."
— Read more at Times Union

This summer, there is a new opera in the mix at Lake George Opera. The groundbreaking one-woman play, "Eleanor: Her Secret Journey," by Rhoda Lerman is now an opera titled "Eleanor Roosevelt." But what does that mean to those of us who are out of the loop?
As playwright Lerman said, "The play is basically how anyone can rise above the strictures of life and marriage and children, and realize her full potential in spite of it all ... or maybe because of it all."
— Read more at The Saratogian

The idea loudly espoused in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte - that women can't help being unfaithful to their men - is hard to swallow under normal circumstances. Encountering the work while Gov. Sanford's confession of serial line-crossing is all over the news requires even more indulgence than usual.
Wolf Trap Opera's intriguing production, which had its final performance Tuesday night at the Barns, emphasized the darker side of Cosi fan tutte, treating the wager that sets the plot in motion as a kind of calculated scientific experiment, set in a pristine clinic.
— Read more at Tim Smith - The Baltimore Sun

Is there a more beguiling place in the Midwest to experience high-quality opera during the summer than the Opera Theatre of St. Louis?
The company's 34th season marked the debut of a new troika consisting of general director Timothy O'Leary (succeeding Charles MacKay, who left St. Louis to helm the Santa Fe Opera), artistic director James Robinson and music director Stephen Lord.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis tapped Timothy O'Leary, 34, to take over as general director last fall to, in part, attract new and younger audiences.
The ticket and revenue numbers show that he and his crew have been able to make that happen.
— Read more at St. Louis Business Journal:

Head to London, New York or Vienna if you're seeking Opera Mecca. Where operetta and musical theater are concerned, the prime destination is a small college town in Ohio.
An exaggeration? The world's great opera houses may field starry singers and extravagant productions, but Ohio Light Opera has been king in its field for three decades at the College of Wooster. No other American company comes close to the exploratory gusto the Wooster pros lavish on beloved and neglected repertoire.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Although Betty Allen is among the greatest black opera singers America has produced, she died in Valhalla, N.Y., on June 22 without the name recognition she deserved. She was 82.
Nonetheless, the mezzo-soprano, a favorite of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, has had significant influence on voices molded and heard right here in Lexington.
— Read more at Kentucky.com

The Metropolitan Opera, struggling to make headway against large and looming deficits, has won a cost saving from its stagehands. The stagehands union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said on Tuesday the workers agreed to forgo a 3 percent increase in salary and benefit expenses for the 2009-2010 season, the last in its contract. The union and the Met agreed to extend the contract for another year, when the full raise will go into effect.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Bayreuth's famous opera festival was threatened with strike action on Wednesday just over three weeks before it opens its doors to the public.
The German services union ver.di said it would not hesitate to call out its members employed at the event in a dispute over pay and working conditions.
— Read more at Monsters and Critics

The Sun Valley Opera was formed in a living room eight years ago by Marsha Ingham, Frank Meyer and Floyd McCracken. Founded to promote opera in Sun Valley, the small, grassroots arts organization reached a milestone on Sunday, June 28, with a sold-out performance at the Sun Valley Pavilion filling 1,400 seats.
— Read more at Idaho Mountain Express

At the Opera Comique in Paris, the theater where it was first performed, Bizet's Carmen has triumphed again. One of the most performed operas around the world, it has recorded nearly 3000 performances alone at the Comique. But a new production with a fresh perspective has given the old girl new life. Hugh Canning, of the Times of London, declares "Carmen has never sounded more revolutionary, romantic or thrillingly vibrant."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Denyce Graves, Washington's homegrown opera superstar, and Robert Montgomery were married yesterday in a quiet ceremony at a chapel of the National Cathedral.
"An intimate thing, just the two of us," as she described it to us last week -- only a handful of guests and the cathedral's dean, the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, there to administer the vows.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

Long Beach Opera will stage three American operas for its 2010 season, the company has announced, including a new production of John Adams' "Nixon in China." Roberk Kurka's "The Good Soldier Schweik," based on Jaroslav Hasek's satirical novel, and a reprisal of Ricky Ian Gordon's "Orpheus and Euridice," staged in a municipal swimming pool, will also be produced as part of Long Beach Opera's 31st season.
— Read more at Timothy Mangan - OCRegister.com

The Royal Opera has announced the withdrawal of Deborah Voigt from the high-profile revival of Tosca, opening on 9 July. The American soprano has cancelled all her appearances as the title role of the opera due to 'acute colitis'.
In her stead, two oustanding Romanian-born sopranos will share the role of Floria Tosca: Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miricioiu.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

The Zurich Opera has named noted Italian conductor Fabio Luisi as its next general music director starting in 2012.
Luisi, the current director of Dresden's Semperoper, on Tuesday welcomed his appointment at a "wonderful house with an exceptional orchestra."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Lyndon Terracini has been appointed the new artistic director of Opera Australia.
Terracini, the artistic director and chief executive of Major Brisbane Festivals, will take up his new role in October. The appointment comes after a four-month international search following the death of music director Richard Hickox in November 2008 and a period of internal review and restructure.
— Read more at Yahoo!7 News

Want some popcorn with your opera? You can have it at the Riviera Theatre, where the new Nickel City Opera is in residence this weekend doing a bang-up job with Rossini's "The Barber of Seville."
With so much good news surrounding the company's first production, knowing where to begin is difficult. Friday's performance of the slapstick opera by Gioachino Rossini featured tremendous voices, fine comic timing, lovely sets, sumptuous 18th century costumes and a competent orchestra. It topped the opera productions I have seen at the Chautauqua Institution. That was how good it was.
— Read more at The Buffalo News